4.18.2006
[the best thing i've read in a long time. in addition to thoreau, the other best thing i've read in a long time.]
Network, Swarm, Microstructure
* To: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net
* Subject: Network, Swarm, Microstructure
* From: Brian Holmes
* Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 06:36:38 -0400
* Reply-to: Brian Holmes
...
a certain kind of complexity theory as a possible way to understand emergent behavior in the real world.
...
I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of
a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the
exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger evironment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work).
...
the art of composing mutable worlds, where the goal of the participants is to carry out continuous transformation of the very parameters and coordinates on which their interactions are based (this is also understood as 3rd-order cybernetics, where the system produces not just new information, but new categories of information).
...
Of course, different individuals are involved each time, different groups, differences of philosophy and mode of action; but a shared horizon makes all those differences also recognizable as somehow belonging together. This is the complexity of self-organization.
...
serious attempts were underway to "overcode" and stabilize the dangerously mobile relational forms that had been unleashed by the generalization of the market and its
weak ties.
On the one hand there is an attempt to enforce the rules of the neoliberal world market by military force, and thus to complete an Imperial project which has now shown itself to be clearly Anglo-American in origin and in aims. This attempt is most clear in the book "The Pentagon's New Map" by Thomas Barnett, where he explains that the goal of American military policy must be to identify the "gaps" in the world network of finance and trade, and to "close the gap," by force if necessary. The thesis (on which the Iraq invasion was partially based) is that only a continuous
extension of the world market and of its deterritorializing technologies can bring peace and prosperity, rooting out the atavistic religious beliefs on which terrorism feeds, and in the process, rationalizing the access to the resources that the capitalist world system needs to go on producing "growth for everyone."
On the other hand, however, what we see in response to this extension of the world are market are regressions to sovereignist or neofascist forms of nationalism, and perhaps more significantly, attempts to configure great continental economic blocs where the instability and relative chaos of market relations could be submitted to some institutional control. These attempts can also be conceived as "counter-movements" in Karl Polanyi's sense: responses to the atomization of societies and the destruction of institutions brought about by the unfettered operations of a supposedly self-regulating market. They can be listed: NAFTA itself; the European Union, which has created its own currency; ASEAN+3, which represents East Asia's so-far abortive attempt to put together a stabilized monetary bloc offering protection from the financial crises continuously unleashed by neoliberalism; the Venezuelan project of "ALBA," which is raising the issue of possible industrial cooperation programs for a left-leaning Latin America; and
of course, the "New Caliphate" in the Middle East, which is being proposed by Al-Qaeda and the other Salafi jihad movements....
I think that in years to come, everyone will increasingly have to take a position with respect both to the Imperial project of a world market, and to the regressive
nationalisms and the more complex processes of bloc formation. All these things are contradictory with each other and their contradictions are at the source of the
conflicts in the world today. In this respect, Guattari's perception, at the close of the 1980s in "Cartographies schizoanalytiques," has proved prophetic:
"From time immemorial, and in all its historical guises, the capitalist drive has always combined two fundamental components: the first, which I call deterritorialization, has to do with the destruction of social territories, collective identities, and systems of traditional values; the second, which I call the movement of reterritorialization, has to do with the recomposition, even by the most artificial means, of individuated frameworks of personhood, structures of power, and models of submission which are, if not formally similar to those the drive has
destroyed, at least homothetical from a functional perspective. As the deterritorializing revolutions, tied to the development of science, technology, and the arts, sweep everything aside before them, a compulsion toward subjective
reterritorialization also emerges. And this antagonism is heightened even more with the phenomenal growth of the communications and computer fields, to the point where the latter concentrate their deterritorializing effects on such human faculties as memory, perception, understanding, imagination, etc. In this way, a certain formula of anthropological functioning, a certain ancestral model of humanity, is expropriated at its very heart. And I think that it is as a result of an incapacity to adequately confront this phenomenal mutation that collective subjectivity has abandoned itself to the absurd wave of conservatism that we are presently witnessing."
The question that complexity theory allows us to ask is this: How do we organize ourselves for a viable response to the double violence of capitalist deterritorialization and the nationalist or identitarian reterritorialization to
which it inevitably gives rise? It must be understood that this dilemna does not take the form of Christianity versus Islam, America versus the Middle East, Bush versus Bin Laden. Rather it arises at the "very heart" of the modern project, where human potential is "expropriated." Since September 11. the USA - and tendentially, the entire so-called "Western world" - has at once exacerbated the abstract, hyperindividualizing dynamics of capitalist globalization, and at the same time, has reinvented the most archaic figures of identitarian power (Guantanamo, fortress
Europe, the dichotomy of sovereign majesty and bare life). Guattari speaks of a capitalist "drive" to deterritorialization, and of a "compulsion" to reterritorialization. What this means is that neither polarity is inherently positive or negative; rather, both are twisted into the violent and oppressive forms that we
now see developing at such a terrifying and depressing pace. The ultimate effect is to render the promise of a world without borders strange, cold and even murderous, while at the same time precipitating a crisis, decay and regression of national institutions, which appear increasingly incapable of contributing to equality or the respect for difference.
So the question that arises is whether one can consciously participate in the improvisational, assymetrical and partially chaotic force of global microstructures, making use of their relative autonomy from institutional norms as a way to influence a more positive reterritorialization, a more healthy and dynamic equilibrium, a better coexistence with the movement of technological development and global
unification? The question is not farfetched, it is not a mere intellectual abstraction. Knorr Cetina's strong point is that global unification cannot occur through institutional process, because it is too complex to be managed in that way; instead, the leading edge is taken by lighter, faster, less predictable microstructures. Clearly, nothing guarantees that these are going to be beneficent.
The forms that they will take remain open, they depend on the people who invent them. In his recent book, Lazzarato writes:
"The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and interepret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity's power of articulation; she links the singular situations together, without placing herself at a superior and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter."
The close of the book makes clear, however, that what should be sought is not just a joyous escape into the unpredictable. The point of this experimentation is to find
articulations [agencements, which might also be translated as microstructures] that can oppose the literally death-dealing powers of the present society, and offer
alternatives in their place. My guess is that in most cases, this can happen not at the local level of withdrawal (though that may be fertile), nor at the level of national institutions and debates (though these will be essential for holding off the worst), but most likely at the regional or continental level, particularly where the core economies overflow into their peripheries and vice-versa. This is the level where the most important policy is now being made, the level at which the major economic circuits are functioning and at which massive social injustice and ecological damage is happening all the time. What's really lacking are all kinds of border-crossing experiments, ways to subvert the macrostructures of inclusion/exclusion and to redraw the maps of coexistence. Ultimately, new kinds of institutions and new ways of relating to institutions will be needed, if there is to be any hope of stabilizing things and surviving the vast transition now underway. But we're not there yet, and it doesn't seem likely that any upcoming election will start the process.
* To: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net
* Subject:
* From: Brian Holmes
* Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 06:36:38 -0400
* Reply-to: Brian Holmes
...
a certain kind of complexity theory as a possible way to understand emergent behavior in the real world.
...
I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of
a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the
exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger evironment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work).
...
the art of composing mutable worlds, where the goal of the participants is to carry out continuous transformation of the very parameters and coordinates on which their interactions are based (this is also understood as 3rd-order cybernetics, where the system produces not just new information, but new categories of information).
...
Of course, different individuals are involved each time, different groups, differences of philosophy and mode of action; but a shared horizon makes all those differences also recognizable as somehow belonging together. This is the complexity of self-organization.
...
serious attempts were underway to "overcode" and stabilize the dangerously mobile relational forms that had been unleashed by the generalization of the market and its
weak ties.
On the one hand there is an attempt to enforce the rules of the neoliberal world market by military force, and thus to complete an Imperial project which has now shown itself to be clearly Anglo-American in origin and in aims. This attempt is most clear in the book "The Pentagon's New Map" by Thomas Barnett, where he explains that the goal of American military policy must be to identify the "gaps" in the world network of finance and trade, and to "close the gap," by force if necessary. The thesis (on which the Iraq invasion was partially based) is that only a continuous
extension of the world market and of its deterritorializing technologies can bring peace and prosperity, rooting out the atavistic religious beliefs on which terrorism feeds, and in the process, rationalizing the access to the resources that the capitalist world system needs to go on producing "growth for everyone."
On the other hand, however, what we see in response to this extension of the world are market are regressions to sovereignist or neofascist forms of nationalism, and perhaps more significantly, attempts to configure great continental economic blocs where the instability and relative chaos of market relations could be submitted to some institutional control. These attempts can also be conceived as "counter-movements" in Karl Polanyi's sense: responses to the atomization of societies and the destruction of institutions brought about by the unfettered operations of a supposedly self-regulating market. They can be listed: NAFTA itself; the European Union, which has created its own currency; ASEAN+3, which represents East Asia's so-far abortive attempt to put together a stabilized monetary bloc offering protection from the financial crises continuously unleashed by neoliberalism; the Venezuelan project of "ALBA," which is raising the issue of possible industrial cooperation programs for a left-leaning Latin America; and
of course, the "New Caliphate" in the Middle East, which is being proposed by Al-Qaeda and the other Salafi jihad movements....
I think that in years to come, everyone will increasingly have to take a position with respect both to the Imperial project of a world market, and to the regressive
nationalisms and the more complex processes of bloc formation. All these things are contradictory with each other and their contradictions are at the source of the
conflicts in the world today. In this respect, Guattari's perception, at the close of the 1980s in "Cartographies schizoanalytiques," has proved prophetic:
"From time immemorial, and in all its historical guises, the capitalist drive has always combined two fundamental components: the first, which I call deterritorialization, has to do with the destruction of social territories, collective identities, and systems of traditional values; the second, which I call the movement of reterritorialization, has to do with the recomposition, even by the most artificial means, of individuated frameworks of personhood, structures of power, and models of submission which are, if not formally similar to those the drive has
destroyed, at least homothetical from a functional perspective. As the deterritorializing revolutions, tied to the development of science, technology, and the arts, sweep everything aside before them, a compulsion toward subjective
reterritorialization also emerges. And this antagonism is heightened even more with the phenomenal growth of the communications and computer fields, to the point where the latter concentrate their deterritorializing effects on such human faculties as memory, perception, understanding, imagination, etc. In this way, a certain formula of anthropological functioning, a certain ancestral model of humanity, is expropriated at its very heart. And I think that it is as a result of an incapacity to adequately confront this phenomenal mutation that collective subjectivity has abandoned itself to the absurd wave of conservatism that we are presently witnessing."
The question that complexity theory allows us to ask is this: How do we organize ourselves for a viable response to the double violence of capitalist deterritorialization and the nationalist or identitarian reterritorialization to
which it inevitably gives rise? It must be understood that this dilemna does not take the form of Christianity versus Islam, America versus the Middle East, Bush versus Bin Laden. Rather it arises at the "very heart" of the modern project, where human potential is "expropriated." Since September 11. the USA - and tendentially, the entire so-called "Western world" - has at once exacerbated the abstract, hyperindividualizing dynamics of capitalist globalization, and at the same time, has reinvented the most archaic figures of identitarian power (Guantanamo, fortress
Europe, the dichotomy of sovereign majesty and bare life). Guattari speaks of a capitalist "drive" to deterritorialization, and of a "compulsion" to reterritorialization. What this means is that neither polarity is inherently positive or negative; rather, both are twisted into the violent and oppressive forms that we
now see developing at such a terrifying and depressing pace. The ultimate effect is to render the promise of a world without borders strange, cold and even murderous, while at the same time precipitating a crisis, decay and regression of national institutions, which appear increasingly incapable of contributing to equality or the respect for difference.
So the question that arises is whether one can consciously participate in the improvisational, assymetrical and partially chaotic force of global microstructures, making use of their relative autonomy from institutional norms as a way to influence a more positive reterritorialization, a more healthy and dynamic equilibrium, a better coexistence with the movement of technological development and global
unification? The question is not farfetched, it is not a mere intellectual abstraction. Knorr Cetina's strong point is that global unification cannot occur through institutional process, because it is too complex to be managed in that way; instead, the leading edge is taken by lighter, faster, less predictable microstructures. Clearly, nothing guarantees that these are going to be beneficent.
The forms that they will take remain open, they depend on the people who invent them. In his recent book, Lazzarato writes:
"The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and interepret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity's power of articulation; she links the singular situations together, without placing herself at a superior and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter."
The close of the book makes clear, however, that what should be sought is not just a joyous escape into the unpredictable. The point of this experimentation is to find
articulations [agencements, which might also be translated as microstructures] that can oppose the literally death-dealing powers of the present society, and offer
alternatives in their place. My guess is that in most cases, this can happen not at the local level of withdrawal (though that may be fertile), nor at the level of national institutions and debates (though these will be essential for holding off the worst), but most likely at the regional or continental level, particularly where the core economies overflow into their peripheries and vice-versa. This is the level where the most important policy is now being made, the level at which the major economic circuits are functioning and at which massive social injustice and ecological damage is happening all the time. What's really lacking are all kinds of border-crossing experiments, ways to subvert the macrostructures of inclusion/exclusion and to redraw the maps of coexistence. Ultimately, new kinds of institutions and new ways of relating to institutions will be needed, if there is to be any hope of stabilizing things and surviving the vast transition now underway. But we're not there yet, and it doesn't seem likely that any upcoming election will start the process.
